Evolution, Ecology and Biodiversity

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My top 5 favorite papers

As the title says, this is a totally subjective list of my favorite papers. I’m of course biased in terms of subjects and authors because of my own field of study and interests.

But how does a paper get into my list of favorites? The requirements are:

How much they motivated me. Motivation is, in my opinion, the most important thing in science (and maybe in any other thing you do in your life?). The papers in this list made me feel like starting working immediately after I finished reading them. In short, these are papers that made me excited about what I could (and can) do in the near future.

How clear they are. Hard-to-read papers are boring papers, and in consequence they won’t be my favorite papers. This is of course subjective. I don’t know a lot of things, which means a lot of papers will be “bad” or “boring” for me. This obviously does not mean they are really bad papers, but this is a personal list. However, I don’t think clarity is always a subjective characteristic. Papers tackling very similar subjects can be different in the way they flow when you read them. Papers that flow easily are more likely to make sense in your mind.

The combination of these two characteristics is what makes a paper good to me. A paper cannot motivate if you cannot understand it, and a paper won’t necessarily motivate you even if it is clearly written.

And again, this is a personal list with personal requirements 🙂 It is also an incomplete list, because (1) I will read hundreds of papers in the future, some of which will probably enter this list, and (2) I probably forgot some papers that I would put here.

Let me start this list with a tie. The macro-scale analyses performed by Pianka several decades ago always motivated me during my first years in science. In some ways these two papers are the past and present of the study of macro-ecological studies in lizards.

You might love or hate these kind of analyses and you might even think that the second paper is just a “let’s put everything together and see what we get” kind of thing. But yeah, this is exactly the kind of study I find very interesting. I will justify myself mentioning that I feel identified with the “journey to an unexplored land” archetype, which is one that E. O. Wilson uses to categorize motivations to do science. I just want to see what is going on there.

In summary, both papers motivated me in different ways and in different times. Ricklefs et al in a more theoretical way, even supplying me with some methods for past work, and Pianka et al in a …visual way? I just think it’s amazing to see the “space” different groups of animals occupy when they are represented by their morphologies and niches.

4

On optimal use of a patchy environmentMacArthur, R. H., & Pianka, E. R. (1966). The American Naturalist, 100(916), 603-609.

This is probably the paper to which I dedicated more hours. Not because it is long or hard to read (it is actually the opposite of that) but because its clarity and simplicity motivated me to take this theoretical paper to an R code. I have an ongoing project with a friend in which we plan to expand the theoretical framework of this paper to see how it behaves when adding other parameters. Exciting!

This paper basically models the number of resource patches an individual should bother to visit considering the quality of the patch, how far it is and the cost of movement and hunting the predator must pay when visiting the different patches. The same theoretical framework can be applied to model the optimal number of different diet items in the predator’s diet.

Last but not least, this is a classical paper. If you are an ecologist or evolutionary biologist you should probably read it.

This is a short paper (is in the “natural history notes” section!) that shows in a super simple way one of my greatest interests, which is phenotypic evolution. In this paper we have a particular genus of salamanders. These salamanders are exceptional in their natural history, as they occupy caves and crevices where they can be found clinging.

At this point a simple hypothesis appears: the rate of evolution of the foot in these cave salamanders should be slower when compared to other morphological traits; this because foot morphology is believed to be highly relevant for climbing, which these salamanders do all the time. Moreover, the authors hypothesize that foot morphology should also evolve at a slower pace when compared to other non-climbing salamanders.

Yes, both hypotheses were supported by the results.

(Fun fact about how I found this paper: I was lucky enough to meet Dean Adams in person and to chat with him for like an hour, discussing different things (I had, of course, more to listen than to say in that meeting). At the end he recommended me to read this paper. And yes, you see it was a good recommendation).

This is one of those papers that has been with me since almost the beginning of my academic life. I like it because it supported some hypothesis I had for my undergrad thesis (and also for posterior papers). The paper shows how a radical change in diet causes rapid changes in the morphology of a population of lizards. These morphological changes are not only external (like head shape), but also appear on the internal organs.

The main point of the paper might be that ecological changes can cause phenotypic adaptation in very short time scales. However, the fact that this ecological change was a dietary shift from insectivory to herbivory has been highly relevant for a large portion of my past and present work, which is related to morphological changes caused by a herbivorous diet.

Extra fact: this paper will probably become a classic in the topic of rapid evolution, as it has already been used as an example of fast adaptation in Richard Dawkins’ The Greatest Show on Earth.

I was surprised by how easy and entertaining this paper was to read. Even more important was that I remember thinking things like “I can apply this same method” or “I could do that on my data” while reading it. On the same week I read this paper I started working on my own data applying similar methods, which was quite exciting. I clearly remember finishing the paper and thinking “this is my favorite paper so far”, and I guess the fact that I’m putting it in 1st place in this list proves that I was not exaggerating!

The paper is basically what it says in the title (and as I approach the end of the post I also start to get too lazy to describe it hehe). The authors test for a correlation between rates of species diversification and morphological evolution in 190 species of salamanders. They found no correlation, which indicates that species diversification can occur with no need of morphological diversification and vice-versa. Nowadays the methods for measuring rates of species diversification cast a lot of doubts among evolutionary biologists, however methods to measure trait evolution are well supported and the possibility to apply them in macro-scales as in this study keeps me as excited as the first time I read it.

Honorable mentions

It was impossible to keep only 5 papers so I added this section to mention some additional ones.Niche overlap and diffuse competitionPianka, E. R. (1974). Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 71(5), 2141-2145.